The unsaid truth about home rentals

I grew up in a small town in Orissa and came to Bangalore for work in 2004.The distinction between renting a house in my hometown and renting it in Bangalore always left me puzzled.

Back in my town, we used to live in a rented place and it never felt awkward to rent. The owner of our house went to the same graduate school as one of our distant relatives & apparently that was all the collateral needed- someone's belief that if we share a connection, we won’t fail him.

Our neighbours were not just families but singles who used to tutor kids and prepare for competitive exams themselves. All that I ever learnt about cricket and about how great IITs & IIMs are was due to Pramod Bhaiya, who was preparing for a bank job & simultaneously tutoring my cousins.

It never occurred to me back then as to what is so wrong with singles that most owners in Bangalore didn't want to rent to them.

The only thing that matched my frustration on “Why pay so much income tax?” was producing 10 months deposit as a proxy “character certificate”. I felt humiliated and sorry for myself - both for being turned down and for being poor, more for the latter.

After three months of frantic search, we found an owner who was kind enough to offer his house to four of us for six months’ deposit in exchange for a little more rent. The chapter was frustrating, tiring and, at times, humiliating & I was glad it was over.

Fast forward 10 years - a cousin goes through the same experience and the owner this time turned out to be a friend. He moves into the house with zero deposit and in-fact less than market rent. The owner also helps friends of my cousin find homes in the same apartment on similar terms.

It’s been almost a year and, except for one utility payment issue, their tenancy has been amicable and cordial. The owner has renewed their agreement without an increase in rent upon finding the house well maintained on two unannounced visits.

These experiences got me thinking about the relationships we have with our assets and people around it. In my town, owners felt better equipped to handle the risks of renting due to strong social connections with neighbours and tenants. Living nearby helped further.

However, our busy city lives have no time for such mundane yet useful relationships. Owner, tenant and neighbour relationships have reduced to that of a merchant, paying customer and POS. Increased apprehension in renting is a symptom of our eroding relationships with tenants - and neighbours to some extent - in the act of operating with good faith.

Look at the barriers and biases this has degenerated into in cities. We demand 10 months’ deposit to begin with. When a single person does it, it’s someone's faltered risk assessment.

When everyone does it, it feels like organized crime. The business world has instruments of insurance to help mitigate risk by paying a fraction of risk as premium. The rental world has no such thing and this affects the youth - the dreamy eyes in their first job or in search of it. We are failing them squarely just because of an outdated, overzealous, and perhaps convenient, risk perception.

Our biases in renting are nothing short of remarkable too - age, gender, marital status, food habits, state of origin, religion, employment status, type of employment, sexual orientation, the way they look – it’s so long that it is almost going into the satire space. By doing what we do today, we are killing ambitions, youthfulness and belief in fairness one home at a time.

With the growing real estate costs in our cities, owning a house and not renting is not an option for majority. Making it harder for tenants is just plain bad economics.

India is on the move & is the youngest it has ever been. As a country, we are moving faster than we ever have. At this time, our youth, the driving force behind the growth, needs to be able to move across the length & breadth of our nation seamlessly – to learn, to work, to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams. The systems supporting this movement need to be as nimble and seamless – which they are not and hence the need for a correction.

While we provide our youth homes, we sometimes rob them of their dignity. They require better ‘living’ – not just better ‘housing’. This entails going beyond the logistics, which I believe is easier to solve. The tougher part is doing away with the biases – some with reason, some just carried forward & some just convenient - that plague this space.

Creating better living experiences is about how we make our cities more welcoming. How do we ensure that the newest residents are more in sync with the ethos and value systems of their new city? I believe the answer lies in fostering goodwill through dialogue and shared community experiences.

We have done some experiments in this direction with very encouraging results. A little more consideration and kindness at both ends will take us a long way.

To summarize, home rental in cities needs to work for its people as much for economic reasons as for our own well being and trust in strangers, systems & good faith. We are thrilled to be playing a part in making our cities safer, better & "not strangers".

The unsaid truth about home rentals is not in increasing the rent or rising real estate prices. It’s about our eroding social relationships. It's like the polar ice caps melting due to global warming.

We all know it is a hard problem, but are cynical about the efficacy of our individual efforts and therefore opt for inaction as a convenient choice.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a choice of not fixing our relationships and hence our cities.

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